Sunday, 14 May 2017

The White Powder's Not That Either: Review and Analysis of Arthur Machen's 'The Novel of the White Powder' (1895)

This
review will spoil the plot in full

Machen could only have disappointed.
Praised by Lovecraft and Stephen King, Arthur Machen’s story will be known by
horror fans, though rarely read. And if read, better left unread, if The Novel of the White Powder indicates
his oeuvre. Machen writes competently, but he cannot justify the label ‘horror’.

Helen Leicester’s brother does nothing but
study law. His idea of recreation involves sitting idly in a chair between case
law binges. But even lawyers grow sick, and he requires a special medicine. Too
special it turns out. The prescription he gets from Dr Haberden changes him –
Francis wants a holiday! More than that he wants to give up the law altogether.
He starts slumming around London. Helen doesn’t know what’s happened, or what
she can do. Her brother rots in front of her, and the very weather seems to
degenerate alongside him. Eventually, he shuts himself in his room, saying he’s
studying law again. When Helen and Haberden knock down the door, they find a
oozing mass. Haberden leaves England, never to return, but sends Helen his
colleague’s analysis of the medicine. This white powder, left on the shelf so
long, with the temperature rising and lowering, had become something… other.
And it has something to do with medieval pagan devil-worshiping cults.

This is less a horror story than a story
with horrified characters. We must take their word for how scary this all is.
Dr Haberden flees Francis’ room, saying, ‘I, who have dealt with death all my
life, and have dabbled with the melting ruins of the earthly tabernacle. But
not this, oh! Not this.’ Machen does attempt showing the horrific, but his
descriptions can fall into diabolic platitudes which evoke no image. Some time
into his transformation, Helen describes Francis as ‘the symbol and presence of
all evil and all hideous corruption’. What is that? What does evil or corruption
look like? Even at the climax, when Machen’s description of Francis reads like
the special-effects brief for a 1980s creature-feature, Machen slips into
vaguery. Francis ‘seeth[es] with corruption and hideous rottenness’. Rottenness
is at least material. I can imagine it. But corruption?

Machen’s descriptions, at times, get
specific, but these images do not terrify. The most powerful image goes:

‘[A]s I lifted my face the blind was being
drawn back, and I had had an instant's glance of the thing that was moving it,
and in my recollection I knew that a hideous image was engraved forever on my
brain. It was not a hand; there were no fingers that held the blind, but a
black stump pushed it aside, the mouldering outline and the clumsy movement as
of a beast's paw had glowed into my senses before the darkling waves of terror
had overwhelmed me as I went down quick into the pit.’

‘Black stump’, ‘beast’s paw’, Helen sees in
her own house, in her own brother, the human act of pushing back the blinds done
by inhuman limbs.

In comparison, Machen’s other attempts at horrific
images seem so much duller. Helen thinks something’s up with her brother when
she sees on his hand – Horror of horrors! – a spot. Machen’s melodramatic style
makes this even more ridiculous. ‘Oh! If human flesh could burn with flame, and
if flame could be black as pitch, such was that before me.’ (There’s no ‘if’
about flame burning, and burns can be black.) Great horror writing can make the
unthreatening terrifying. A child’s ball can be terrifying. But if you just
show me a child’s ball, I’m not scared. Even if you blare a load of scary music
around it, I won’t scream. I’ll laugh. This ‘small patch about the size of a
sixpence’ could be terrifying, but from another writer’s pen.

The climax fares better:

‘I looked, and a pang of horror seized my
heart as with a white-hot iron. There upon the floor was a dark and putrid
mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor
solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous
oily bubbles like boiling pitch. And out of the midst of it shone two burning
points like eyes, and I saw a writhing and stirring as of limbs, and something
moved and lifted up what might have been an arm. The doctor took a step
forward, raised the iron bar and struck at the burning points; he drove in the
weapon, and struck again and again in the fury of loathing.’

But it’s not scary, is it? Earlier I said
it was like a 1980s creature-feature, with their moistly grotesque practical
effects. They were rarely scary; they were merely repellent. As an image, this
climax doesn’t achieve what Machen wants it to. As the climax of the story, it
doesn’t either. This last shot of gruesomeness, after a long time of relatively
subdued stuff, feels like the twist from a pre-Comics’ Code horror comic.

Unlike one of those horror comics, Machen
can’t just leave us with this image. He must explain it. The denouement gives us a pseudo-scientific,
pseudo-pagan mythology explanation for all that happened. We read a letter
verbatim from one of Dr Haberden’s associates, a man who only exists for
exposition. He waffles on about how science doesn’t know everything, and how
the universe is more than material, and that evil rituals were carried out in
medieval Europe. I’m not expecting philosophical, scientific, or historical
rigour from a story ending in an oozing demon corpse. I would be fine if Machen
glossed over this explanation in three sentences. He takes three pages. My
tolerance for bad arguments does not last three pages. And does this fluff add
anything to the story? Not much, only a snippet towards the end, which I shall
get to later.

As a literary horror writer, it would be
wrong to judge Machen on his scares-per-word count. Let’s see if the story’s subtext
can make it interesting. I’ll first dismiss an obvious, but boring, interpretation
of the story. The Novel of the White
Powder is a drug addiction allegory.

We have Francis, a man so establishment he
does nothing but study law. One day, without his knowledge, he ingests a drug,
which is dangerous. And pleasurable. He seems happier than ever, and at first
only his closest family can see what’s wrong. But Francis’ ‘recreation’ soon
becomes hedonism. His break from the study of law becomes a full rejection of
it, a fall from the establishment to bohemianism. His personality changes,
until he becomes a stranger. His body degenerates, until even his own sister
can only look at his ruin in horror. He is undone by his addiction.

A valid interpretation, but accepting it
would do a disservice to Machen. Although I don’t much like this story, it is
more than a didactic moral allegory. Judging this as a drug story, lowers it.
The supernatural exaggerations do not enhance, but blunt the story of a drug
addict. Were it drug story, it would have done better as a realist one.

And now for the more interesting
interpretation, the one which Machen spells out in expositional letter at the
end. The powder makes Original Sin flesh:

‘[A] few grains of white powder thrown into
a glass of water, the house of life was riven asunder and the human trinity
dissolved, and the worm which never dies, that which lies sleeping within us
all, was made tangible and an external thing, and clothed with a garment of
flesh. And then, in the hour of midnight, the primal fall was repeated and
re-presented, and the awful thing veiled in the mythos of the Tree in the
Garden was done anew.’

Adam and Eve fell from the perfect order of
paradise. Francis fell from absolute law. He sins, but his sins do not merely
tear his soul, they tear reality:

‘the sky began to flush and shine … in the
gap between two dark masses that were houses an awful pageantry of flame
appeared – lurid whorls of writhed cloud, and utter depths burning, grey masses
like the fume blown from a smoking city, and an evil glory blazing far above
shot with tongues of more ardent fire, and below as if there was a deep pool of
blood.’

Machen makes this more complex than a black
and white fall from paradise to sin. Francis rots in an extreme of sin, but his
extreme of law was never virtue. What is the law when not applied to humanity?
Francis studies the law like a hermit. All well and good, if he were in any
other field, whose education did not decide the fate of others. As a student of
the law, his education will never be complete if he only studies the law, and
not the society which the law governs.

Although the pagan ritual of the white
powder has the ‘primal fall … repeated and re-presented’, it is not the primal
fall. The primal fall has happened; we have the Original Sin to show for it.
Francis’ lawful beginnings parody Eden. He cannot live in pure law, because
Original Sin already debases him.

Although this interpretation grabs me more,
it also leaves me less scared. Lovecraft’s critique of Machen holds: he
believes in sin. For Machen, sin is not merely socially undesirable acts. Sin
is an affront to the foundation of the universe. Immorality takes on a
supernatural fascination. A fascination I, and other atheists, cannot share.
This story about reality tearing around this sinner interests me only as much
any curious belief system does.

Aesthetically and thematically, The Novel of the White Powder does not
scare. Its images either lack definition, or, where they have definition, lack
impact. As I’ve heard of Machen’s greatness, and of the mark he left on
Lovecraft, I hope this story is one of his weaker efforts.